The Boy Out of Jersey
by GoddessofSnark
Summary: Wilson had lived in New Jersey for his entire life, aside from college. But this time, there's nothing left to keep him in the state. But while you can take the boy out of Jersey, you can't take the Jersey out of the boy. Post Dying Changes Everything.


A/N This was written after remarking to my roomate that the one thing I hate most about the show is that it makes me nostalgic, and that the one thing I hate most about House is when they use exteriors that are clearly NOT the Princeton area. And even though I haven't lived in the great Garden State for a good two years, there isn't a day that goes by that I don't miss something about it, be it the mall, or Six Flags, or going down the shore, or taking the train up to the City...and this came about when I thought about Wilson leaving after the death of Amber, before he comes back. Although I never actually did get around to seeing Dying Changes Everything, so if he doesn't actually leave the state, pretend that he did, and decided that even if he was leaving House in the dust that the grip of NJ was just too powerful. As for my idea of where Wilson comes from, Robert Sean Leonard is a Ridgewood boy, and figured that it's a good enough place for Wilson to come from too.  


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08540. Five numbers that never meant anything to him. Neither did 08536, or a brief stint in 08648. Just like 609, they're an indication of a place, and they mean nothing. A hotel on route one, that he didn't even know the address of, just that it had an 08540 mailing address. Princeton. Covering from the end of Alexander Road where it crossed route one through past what once had been a decent shopping center, now mostly out of business. With his hotel in between.

08536 had been a small apartment in Plainsboro, not worth the amount of rent he paid on it. He could have found mortgages on bigger places for cheaper. The only thing that this place had going for it was that it was walking distance from the hospital, not much further than the hotel he currently called "home".

It had been a townhouse in 08648 in a complex with more people that didn't speak English than those who did. House had liked that place, if only because of the great Indian place that was just behind his building, still part of the complex. He'd liked it because it was more out of the way. But he couldn't stand his neighbors-the crotchety old lady that once complained that he had dug his car out of the snow and put all of the snow behind her car, ignoring the fact that the snowplows did that, and the only snow he'd removed was that off his windshield. The people next door who didn't speak a word of English, but screamed so loudly at one another in whatever variant of an Eastern language-he presumed Hindi, but it could have just as well been moonspeak for all he knew, that it kept him up at night.

All of them had been in the 609, he hadn't left the area code in most of his adult life. When he had been little, he used to dream about getting away from New Jersey-he had been in the 201 then, when 201 had applied to most of North Jersey. Well, the parts of North Jersey with people in them anyway. The western part of the state, where it butted up against the flat end of New York was a place reserved for family vacations, land that had still not been touched.

And then he had gone to college, a brief stay in a foreign land, with a foreign postal system that made him long for days where everything he sent began with an zero in front of it. Whether it was letters back home to Ridgewood, or to friends who had gone on to state schools. Most to Ramapo, some to Rutgers or Trenton State, some as far away as Rowan, but they all were contained in the range of zip codes that began with with a zero.

He'd been happy to come back to the states for grad school, enjoying time in Columbia-only a short train ride away from home, and Penn, which also, was no further than a train ride away. And then he'd done the one thing that was unthinkable to him in his youth, and returned to the state that he had so despised when growing up, to find it having changed drastically in his ten year absence. Central Jersey hadn't been much more than a few farms surrounding Trenton when he was growing up. Sure, Princeton had always been there, and he thought, would always be there, and Lawrenceville wasn't that bad.

But houses were springing up where they hadn't been. The hotel that he had been calling home hadn't even existed when he first moved to the area. Princeton-Plainsboro had been the only thing on the road that ran between route one and plainsboro, and the places nearby hadn't even been planned. The house that he had lived in when he called 08648 home was just being built when he got there.

But all these numbers, they had just been a way for other people to figure out where he lived to make things like phone calls and mail get to where they were going. They meant nothing to him, not really. Just another reminder of another place lived. He could recall every phone number he'd ever had that started with a 609 area code, and the only one that he'd ever had with a 201-his parents still hadn't given up the phone number from his youth.

So when he looked at his car, and the pale yellow plates that demarcated where he was from, making sure that he had everything, it shouldn't have mattered. When he drove over the Morrisville bridge into Pennsylvania, it shouldn't have mattered that it would be the last time that he had to put up with the endless lane changes of construction that he swore would never finish. It shouldn't have mattered that he was leaving it all behind.

But it did. As much as he didn't want it to, it did. Pale yellow plates had become a staple in his life, a sign to drivers everywhere that the person behind the wheel did not, in fact, know how to drive, but that they somehow managed to navagate the never ending roadways, confusing jug handles, and the zoo that called itself the turnpike without fault. Zero starting zip codes had burned themselves into his brain, and no matter how far away he knew someone lived, he had to fight the urge to write down an 08 or an 07. No matter who he was talking to, his finger always went to the six on the keypad first to call.

New Jersey was like a cancer. He thought it might have something to do with the sheer amounts of toxicity floating around the state. It mutated you, and at first you ignored it. It was, after all, New Jersey the armpit of the United States. You denied that the state could possibly have a life-altering affect on you, because it was New Jersey. And then came the anger when the realization that living in a state that existed simply to hold all the people that couldn't fit into the geographical borders of New York or Philly had grown on you. When the realization that you were defending your state in conversation came up.

And then there was the bargaining-the one part that he was most familiar with. "Well, I'm living here, so if I can just get out of here, things will be better. Just a few more years here, and then I can move on to bigger, better things in live. I'll stay for just a bit longer, while my family's still here, and then I can cut ties and go." It was a familiar thought, whenever he considered just where he lived. Whenever someone would make a derisive comment about a state that produced more entertainers per capita than any other part of the country-simply because everyone who was born there honed a talent to get them out of there.

There was the depression, when he realized that he was never going to get out. That New Jersey had somehow taken him over, and taken him hold. That he had actually learned how to enjoy the state made him all the more depressed. It wasn't someplace you were supposed to like, if popular media had their say, and it made him, well, depressed to realize that he'd grown to like the state, despite the way that it seemed with every passing month there were more houses. He could have tracked the development of Princeton Junction by each year that he'd lived there. It had started with the neighborhoods near the train station and high school, carry over from Princeton as it broke free of it's geographic bounds. And the adjunct town slowly grew. Only he'd never paid attention to it-he'd simply driven down Village Road one day, and wondered where the soybean farm that had once stood sprawling out down to the elementary school had gone.

And he had just finally started to accept that maybe, just maybe, New Jersey was his home when his life came crashing down around him. The one person that he thought that maybe, just maybe, he could have a solid relationship with, who wouldn't push him into cheating, who he might actually stick with enough to grow old with, had been taken from him. And suddenly, just when he was starting to accept that maybe, just maybe, being an idiot from New Jersey wasn't such a bad thing, he had no reason to stay in the state.

He hadn't gotten further than the Harrisburg exit on the Pennsylvania Turnpike when he considered turning around and heading back to where things were the same. Where every zip code started out with either an 07 or an 08, where he barely had to consider area codes, as everyone he knew that wasn't in his family that he called on a regular basis started with 609. Where he knew the phone numbers of all the local delivery places off the top of his head. 895-1555, 689-1500, where everything that he needed was within a five minute drive.

He looked down at his key ring, the familiar blue of a Mercer County Library card-even when he'd lived in Plainsboro, it had been easier to drive to the West Windsor library. The greying white of his Acme discount card, and the yellow of ShopRight, and the blue of McCafferies. He knew he'd miss having six different grocery stores to go to when he needed food. He'd miss gigantic shopping malls, and massively spread out strip malls. He'd miss being able to walk across the parking lot and go to Best Buy, Home Depot, Walmart and Borders in one go.

He'd miss walking down Nassau street in the rain, enjoying the old stone buildings that had been there since the town was founded long before the revolution. He'd miss heading down to the park on the Delaware, not having anything else to do on Christmas mornings, watching the reenactment of the battle that changed the future of America, the blitzkrieg that led to Washington's victory.

He'd miss the endless traffic down Route One, heading in towards Lawrenceville at night, and heading towards Princeton in the mornings, everyone commuting north, and then back home in the south again. He'd miss good bagels and lox, he'd miss greasy thin-crust pizza, and Aljon's special sauce. He'd miss real fried rice that he'd purposely drive out to East Windsor to get, despite having a place right by him. Where it was white rice that had been fried brown, instead of rice that had been dyed yellow.

08648, 08536, 08540, 609, 201, they were all just numbers assigned to things. They were all just there to make other people's lives easier, they had no bearing on his on life. But each one of those had affected him more than he could ever put into words. But he drove on, wanting to put as much distance between himself and a state that had nothing good going for it. He wanted to get as far away from it as possible, to actually follow his dreams.

They were all just numbers, but they were numerical representations of a life that he had lived, of the life that he had. They were numerical representations of those things that would never be put into words, because they couldn't be put into words. They were signs and symbols of hat he was. Despite ho much e claimed to hate the state, it was as much a part of him as his name, as his family. And try as he might to convince himself that this was a good thing, that he needed to get away, he knew in his heart that one simple fact that he saw paraded around on t-shirts and gaudy bumper stickers by the spiked bleach blonde hair crowd that all too often took up the entire boardwalk when he went down the shore, was true of every resident of the state.

"You can take the boy out of the Jersey, but you can't take the Jersey out of the boy."

And as James Wilson drove off, leaving his life behind, something in his heart knew that he would eventually wind up back in the state that everyone tried so hard to get out of. It had just become a part of who he was, as loathe as he was to admit it. He was leaving New Jersey, but New Jersey would never leave him. It was a cancer, and it had spread through him, infecting every part of him so that he could no longer discern what about him was his own, and what about him had been molded by breathing in toxic fumes that the rest of the state called fresh air on a daily basis. It couldn't be operated on, there was no amount of radiation or chemotherapy that could remove this taint that called itself his home. And he knew that he'd be back, be it in a day, a month, a year, but he knew, try as he might to fight it, there was no way to leave Jersey behind.


End file.
